Why You Should Own Your Own Domain - The Joys of Email

If you’ve surfed the web for at least a year or two (or maybe even less), you know that it’s constantly in flux. A business that is online today may be bankrupt tomorrow and close its web site the following week. Even large companies can fall victim to this, and that includes companies that give you access to the Internet itself.

Let me put aside web hosting companies for the moment; I’m not talking about them, I’m talking about the companies that handle your Internet connection from your home and/or business -- the Comcasts and EarthLinks and other Internet service providers of the world. Usually, when you have an Internet connection, you also have an email account with the company providing the connection, like yourname@comcast.com. That’s fine – but what happens if and when you change ISPs? Whether it’s because the ISP goes out of business, or you move into an area to which the company doesn’t provide service, or if you’re simply unhappy with them, your email address changes, and you have to tell all of your contacts (or risk losing messages).

The same thing can happen if you have a free web-based email account with Google or Yahoo or Microsoft or even Lycos. To give a personal example, I started using a Lycos email account several years ago because at the time they offered the largest mailbox: 5 MB. When Google came out with its Gmail, I wanted to switch, but by then I’d been with Lycos so long that it would have been a pain. Lycos has since expanded its mailbox, but it took months to do so, and I’ve had some issues with it that it didn’t have before the expansion.

If you have your own domain name, you can set up an email address with it – say yourname@yourawesomesite.com. And you can set it up in such a way that it forwards the messages you receive to whatever email address you’re currently using, whether it’s with Gmail or Hotmail or Comcast or some small local ISP that gives you an incredible deal because your brother-in-law owns the company. Then the only email address you hand out is the one associated with your domain name. If you change the address at which you’re receiving email, all you have to do is change the redirect that you have set up.

If you have a web site and an online business, another nice thing about having your own domain name is that you can set up lots more email addresses than most free web hosts would permit you to have. When web surfers see that they can contact sales@youronlinestore.com, support@youronlinestore.com, feedback@youronlinestore.com, and others, they figure that they’re dealing with an established company. From your point of view, this helps you organize and filter your email.